Saturday, June 11, 2016

Ethics is necessarily a conversation; not a negotiation, at least not always, but certainly discussion and social interaction.

classification, observation, and manipulation as the three moments of scientific thought
- these are, in fact, moments of experience in general, scientific inquiry being reflected-upon systematic experience

Theoretical truth is practical constraint.

Scientific inquiry is itself a social context.

To say that something is true by definition implies that it ought to be taken as given in some relevant system of thought.

The conventional, under appropriate rational conditions, converges on the natural.

A natural classification is that to which artificial classifications ought to tend.

In the Eucharist we (1) are transformed into what we consume; (2) are made sharers of Christ's divine nature; (3) are prepared for external gifts; (4) celebrate in sign that which will one day be perfected in us in truth.

Compatibilism in its more popular forms involves a confusion between determinateness and determination.

We should only appear at the banquet of the Lamb in the wedding garment of repentance.

locative affinity

classification as structuring inductions

the implicit ampliative character of truth itself

the deontic structure of induction

Calvin's commentary on Malachi is a criticism of Catholic conceptions of priesthood.

Simple enumeration, merely as such, does not reach a proper universal.

Representative samples are built by systematicity, not randomization; the latter is merely one thing that can rule out some biases that may interfere with systematicity. The link between representative sample and systematic sampling follows from the notion of representativeness itself.

probability as possibility plus degree of relevance

Probabilities, being measurements, are relative to the method of measurement used.

Endeavoring peace requires hope.

pacifism // passive obedience

A species has, beyond its members, its history and capacity to project itself forward.

Perversions of views of marriage have backed and germinated heresy for literally the entire history of the Church.

It is clear that God must be:
(1) first principle of our free will as a power
(2) first principle of the actuality of our free choice
(3) first principle of all goodness in the power and the act
and that He must be original, sustaining, and final cause in each case.

creativity in mathematics: a sense of the territory (to reduce wrong steps & establish priorities) + obsessiveness in rigor (to rule tihngs out or in definitively) + rapid thought (to avoid being bogged down or stuck too long exploring dead end routes)

Providence works both superordinately and coordinately with creatures.

"If God moved bodies by particular volitions, it would be a crime to avoid by flight the ruin of a collapsing building; for one cannot, without injustice, refuse to return to God the life He has given us, if He demands it." Malebranche
- Thus Malebranche holds that God's work through general laws allows us to correct nature without correcting God, to resist nature without resisting God, etc.

Doubt by its nature posits an end or satisfaction of doubt.
Doubt presupposes the possibility of knowledge. There is reason to think the reverse is not.

That something could be false is not the same as its being possible that it is false.

We come to understand the principle of noncontradiction by actually reasoning.

Any question of reliability is a teleological question.

Confidence does not come with percentages.

The post-medieval world is an age of theft: nations rise by plundering the Church and other nations, positions rise by plundering the cultural heritage of others, money is made by plundering time and effort. To plunder occurs always; making it the center of everything, however, is another thing entirely. It's the brazenness of it that is remarkable.

Mendelssohn's definition of 'church' -- 'public institution for the cultivation of man, concerning his relations with God' -- includes much more than what we usually think of as a church.

"civilisation is founded on abstractions" Chesterton

unfitness and the horror genre

Note that Vatican I explicitly says that following are acts of definition in which the Pope exercises infallible teaching authority: summoning an ecumenical council to define a doctrine, consulting the opinion of churches throughout the world to define a doctrine, calling a special synod to define a doctrine. (There is also the miscellaneous category, 'taking advantage of other useful means afforded by divine providence'.)
Papal teaching authority is exercised with and for the Church.

Marriage cannot exist in a way that is inconsistent as a general condition with rational and virtuous family life, for it is itself and by nature familial.

natural classification
(1) affinities determined by whole
(2) arrangements are of greatest degree of relation
(3) the imperfectly known may be determined from the known

the importance of there being a romantic love that is not sexual in its goals

quantification as scope of inquiry

systematic vs nonsystematic intellectual inquiry

"We know with much greater clarity that our will is free than that everything that happens must have a cause." Lichtenberg

(1) The will is not necessitated in its choices by any prior cause.
(2) Our choices are attributable to us and are not beyond our control.
(3) We have a will naturally not determined to one.

'Life' admits of more and less.

Necessary regulative principles of empirical inquiry imply general constitutive theses about sensible nature and sensible phenomena. So also with the intelligible, mutatis mutandis.

What is always and necessarily *as if* is certainly *so*.

sublimity as a background for friendship

In marriage, love of self, love of neighbor, and love of God begin to overlap in sometimes obvious ways.

Loving is to goodness as dwelling or resting is to beauty.

prudence as the structure of good parenting

The sensible is always explained by the intelligible.

To defeat demons requires setting aside all pretense at being wholly in control.

We learn restraint by precept and example.

Prediction and retrodiction are the standard modes of exegetical confirmation.

(1) What is intelligible is not in itself sensible; therefore what knows the intelligible is not in itself sensible.
(2) What knows has the intelligible form of something, but not in the way the material thing has it; therefore what knows is not, as such, material.

The problem of evil requires that the moral principles used be precisely defined and either self-evident or demonstrable.

"The devil has his contemplatives even as God has his." Cloud of Unknowing XLV

(1) There is nonsensible but intelligible agency.
(2) Sensible phenomena are explained by intelligible agency.

Ontologies and epistemologies mutually suggest each other.

nonextrinsic similarity as suggesting shared causal history

tendency to end, intrinsic order, limitation, form of persistence
(four ways of thinking of natures)

When we assert, we often do so on another person's authority.
assertion-for-the-nonce, assertion-from-a-perspective

Truth sometimes sets us free by killing us.

reasonable hope as the key to double effect

coherence : truth :: integrity : good :: harmony : beauty

Truly to know that one has sinned against love is painful, and it is a pain that endures even if one fails to repents of the sin itself.

implicature of behavior in the virtue of temperance (substance, quality, quantity, relation) -- quality is the tricky one
the appearance of condoning
our behavior as communicating values
the casuistry of temperance-related implicature
what one's actions communicate to oneself
integritas, claritas, and proportionalitas in temperance

We should tend to avoid actions that could be confused with serious evils, if they became known.
We should tend to avoid actions that could be seen as condoning serious evils, if they became known.
We should tend to avoid actions that are very similar to serious evils.
We should tend toward actions that would communicate respect for persons, if the actions were known.
We should tend toward actions that would communicate the importance of virtuous disciplines if the actions were known.

postulates of communicative reason

infrastructural tracks for intellectual alliances

felicity conditions for sacraments

the authorities of the Holy See
(1) intrinsic
(2) by long possession
(3) by (non-intrinsic) succession
(4) by positive law
(5) by interest of the Church

evaluation of argument in terms of
(1) appropriateness to rational ends
(2) rigor and requirement
(3) durability in the face of objection-candidates
(4) simplicity and elegance

Paramount released Ferris Bueller's Day Off on June 11, 1986. A little known fact: Ben Stein's monotonous lecture about the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and supply-side economics was not in the script; he had been amusing the cast with mock lecturing, and they liked it so much that John Hughes had him improvise a lecture for the camera.

The movie wears surprisingly well, partly because the weaker humor isn't front and center. I find I have much more sympathy with Mr. Rooney these days than I did in decades ago; but it is as true as ever that "Life moves pretty fast; if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it!"

Today is the memorial of Blessed Ignatius Shoukrallah Maloyan (1869-1915). He was an Armenian Catholic belonging to the Patriarchal Order of Bzommar. He spent much of his career as a parish priest in Egypt, but in 1911 was made Archbishop of Mardin. The appointment would lead to his death.

In 1915, Mehmed Reshid, governor of the Ottoman province of Diyarbekir, having become convinced that Christian communities were a significant cause of the economic problems of the Empire and that they were conspiring with its enemies during World War I, began the systematic extermination of Armenian and Assyrian Christians throughout his province, and the Armenian Genocide came to Mardin. In June, the leaders of the Armenian Catholic community of Mardin were taken to court. During the trial, Bl. Ignatius was asked if he would convert. When he refused, he was beaten, and he and a large crowd of Armenian Christians were driven by forced march into the desert and killed, one by one. Bl. Ignatius was shot after he refused again to convert. He was beatified in 2001.

Friday, June 10, 2016

In fact it is knowing that causes love and gives birth to it. It is not possible to attain love of anything that is beautiful without first learning how beautiful it is. Since this knowledge is sometimes very ample and complete and at other times imperfect, it follows that the philtre of love has a corresponding effect. Some things that are beautiful and good are perfectly known and perfectly loved as befits so great beauty. Others are not clearly evident to those who love them, and love of them is thus more feeble.

Thursday, June 09, 2016

A star there is, they said, so near to God's own throne
it rules both near and far and governs as its own
the lights both great and small that shine in heaven's heights,
those children, one and all, that beam in endless night.
Its every day, they said, lasts for a thousand years
in which God's children play with smiles and no tears;
and every journal's thought exceeds in wisdom's reach
all things our scribes have taught, all things our lives can teach.
And from that place, perhaps, one sees the host of hosts
that sprinkle endless space, the sea without a coast --
and there the forests old spread endless and unmarred;
their trunks are trunks of gold, and every leaf -- a star.

But standing here, I said, I know a greater thing
than any extant sphere around which worlds can ring:
the One that prays with tears while facing endless loss
but overcomes all fears to stretch forth on a cross,
and rises up once more, a lamb upon a throne,
the way, the sheepfold's door, the knower and the known;
he is the branching vine and we the grafted stems
that praise with cheerful wine the endlessness of him.

River

The force of love to rush,
to flood,
is force of love to river be,
not pool or puddle on the plain:
it moves with end and not in vain,
to flow through vale to violet sea,
to find a home in unbound good.

Yet every water must be bound,
or, formless,
it will forceless move,
creep and seep,
devoid of rush,
like words that waver into hush,
enslaved by furrow and by groove.
That way the sea is never found.

Love in every way may veer,
may fall away,
may fail.
As rivers overflow we err --
the border burdens by being there --
and waves will war,
fight and flail,
for bounds are death:
death we fear.

All-Father's Knowledge

Weird is the wyrd of man,
and wild,
writ on stars with sacred stile,
carved on ash of ages blessed,
carved on leaves.
The bracts confess truth to those who hang for nine --
nine days,
nine nights,
in death sublime.
Eye then opens --
source of awe --
wise becomes the Hanging God:
wise with lore of ancient runes,
wise in ways of birth and doom.
Draughts,
fresh-drawn from prophet's well
(poets there will drink their fill,
the scops who,
with their eddas,
dream of things to come and things unseen),
will wake from slumber sleeping thoughts --
wise becomes the prophet-God,
who gives an eye to be made wise,
who on the ash of ages dies.
Ravens soar from rainbow-bridge
with piercing eye for all things hid,
go back and forth through all the lands --
of death,
of elf,
of god,
of man;
through all ages restless roam from root to crown to Father's throne,
thought and memory turned to wing,
seeking out all truths unseen.

Good is He, for lo! He labours in these two things—He wills not to constrain our freedom— nor again does He suffer us to abuse it.— For had he constrained it, He had taken away its power—and had He let it go, He had deprived it of help.

He knows that if He constrains He deprives us—He knows that if He casts off He destroys us—He knows that if He teaches He wins us.— He has not constrained and He has not cast off, as the Evil One does:— He has taught, chastened, and won us, as being the good God.

He knows that His treasuries abound:— the keys of His treasuries He has put into our hands.— He has made the Cross our treasurer— to open for us the gates of Paradise,— as Adam opened the gate of Gehenna.

Wednesday, June 08, 2016

So the presumptive nominees of the major parties for President are, on the one hand, a billionaire who is universally recognized to be self-aggrandizing, and, on the other, a dynastic politician no one trusts who is under investigation by the FBI for violating national security law. I don't vote major party in presidential elections, so I don't have anything more to say about that except:

At this point, to be sure, it really wouldn't be surprising if we got to the voting booth and turned out to be rickrolled.

I once had an idea for a story in which the American President, President Beltrane, is a fantastically popular supervillain who vacations in his volcano lair, has a vice president who is an inarticulate Frankenstein-monster named Henchman, and whose campaign promises and policies consist of a mix of supervillain schemes and taking real political slogans to an insane limit. For instance, as a tax-cutting measure he holds Ireland for ransom in order to pay for government paperclips, and he advocates forcing everyone to undergo weekly physical examinations at the doctor's office because it's not universal health care if there are people not receiving it. But looking at this election, I find that there are just infinitely many ways in which I am not imaginative enough.

* There was some recent hubbub over the possible discovery of Aristotle's tomb in Stagira recently. (Strictly speaking, it was a hubbub over a paper that was delivered at the World Aristotle Congress suggesting that a tomb discovered several years ago might be Aristotle's.) David Meadows looks at the actual evidence for the claim.

The church of Santa Francesca Romana (also sometimes known as Santa Maria Nova):

I mentioned before that we were at the forum just after the ides of March. Just before that, though, on March 9, is the feast day of Saint Frances of Rome, and I'm told that on that day, the entire street up to the Colosseum crowds with cars. St. Frances, you see, is the patron saint of automobiles, so on her feast day, Romans go to her church in order to get their cars blessed. (A very rational thing to do if you drive in Rome.)

In Martha's house the weary Master lay,
Spent with his faring through the burning day.
The busy hostess bustled through the room
On household cares intent, and at His feet
The gentle Mary took her wonted seat.
Soft came His words in music through the gloom.

Cumbered about much serving Martha wrought--
Her sister listening as the Master taught--
Till something fretful an appeal she made:
"Doth it not matter that on me doth fall
The burden; Mary helpeth not at all?
Master, command her that she give me aid."

"Ah, Martha, Martha! Thou are full of care,
And many things thy needless trouble share."
Thus with the love that chides the Master spake:
"One thing alone is needful. That good part
Hath Mary chosen from her loving heart;
And that part from her shall I never take."

****

One thing alone we lack. Our souls, indeed,
Have fiercer hunger than the body's need.
Ah, happy they that look in loving eyes.
The harsh world round them fades. The Master's Voice
In sweetest music bids their souls rejoice
And wakes an echo there that never dies.

Monday, June 06, 2016

In so many areas of inquiry (though, perhaps, not all), philosophical argument ends up bottoming out in a mere clash of intuitions, of considered judgments. But what happens now? Because these considered judgments will help determine the content and structure of our philosophical theorizing, to determine (once and for all) what the good life is for a person (or whether we should be descriptivists or causal theorists of reference, or whether justified true belief counts as knowledge or not, or — if Lewis Carroll is to be believed — whether modus ponens is a valid rule of inference) we — or so it would appear — need to settle which of these intuitions are the right ones.

To put my cards on the table, this seems like an impossible task. Indeed, it’s a task that seems (almost by definition) outside the bounds of philosophical argument.

One of the things I have been pointing out on this blog since I was in graduate school is that 'intuitions' aren't unitary things, and I have always been baffled at any suggestion that they are somehow a ne plus ultra. If we compare what contemporary philosophers say about intuitions and look at approaches from other times that at least cover part of the same ground -- Aristotelian topics, the Nyaya account of pramanas, and Scottish Enlightenment accounts of common sense, for example, all of which are finer-grained than contemporary talk of 'intuitions' -- we see clearly enough that we could be, and should be, much more precise about what is going on when they come up. And when we do we may realize that different kinds of intuitions are involved, or that the intuitions are not all equally evident, or even that some of the intuitions are not even coherent.

Intuitions are beginnings, not bedrocks. Conflicts of intuitions are the kinds of thing reasonable people wonder about, and wondering is the beginning of philosophy. Philosophy doesn't bottom out on them; the rational person will precisely start to wonder about what goes into these intuitions that leads to the differences.

One of the great temptations for philosophers through the century is to confuse features of communication and features of reason -- we always present our philosophy in certain ways, and it can be tempting to assume that those formats are just the way reason works, as if reason could not work in some other way entirely. For instance, someone may do all their philosophy in debates, and if they did, they might be tempted to think of good reasoning as being entirely disputational, because that's the way they polish it up in their own context. It has been difficult over the past century to convince many academic philosophers that you could perfectly well do philosophy with poetry or fiction, despite the fact that it certainly has been done -- because these are not usually features of how academic philosophers in this day and age communicate. And there are other ways in which this can be manifested. I think we see one of them in this case of intuitions. Appeal to intuitions has spread fairly widely in academic texts, and I think a plausible reason why is that you can't fully develop the argument in the formats academic texts usually have. If you are writing a thirty page paper on some very complicated topic, there are going to be things that you just have to ask the reader to take for granted for the sake of the argument; and when an academic philosopher appeals to the intuitive, that's precisely what's happening -- he or she is summarizing a reason for thinking that it's reasonable to accept this. It's something inevitable in the nature of the format, and it's certainly better that it be flagged and insisted upon than that it slide by without comment.

But in real life, we are not wholly bounded by page limits and the fact that we are writing about topic A and can't also write about topic B.Faced with conflicts among these intuitive appeals, we don't have to just throw up our hands and say, "Irreconcilable difference!" Reasoning itself doesn't bottom out like that. We can perfectly well ask more questions, look into the matter more deeply, test for consistency, analyze into constituent parts, compare to other cases, and any of a very large variety of rational activities.

I am sympathetic to Dorsey's notion of an 'atlas-drawing' approach to philosophy; it is, I think, an important part of philosophy, more important than is sometimes realized. It's also the sort of thing I do as a historian of philosophy -- just map out the positions to determine what positions there are. But there is no "phenomenon of intuitive bedrock". There are merely points at which inquiry begins to form along different lines.

Sunday, June 05, 2016

The recommendations are in, and it looks like there is a slight preference for either Prometheus or Ibsen, so I've decided to go with the double volume of Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, and see if I can get Ibsen in later this year.

Greek tragedies come in threes with a satyr play to top them off. Prometheus Bound was the first of the Prometheia trilogy, and the only extant play in the trilogy. (The only extant trilogy by Aeschylus is the Oresteia, which will also eventually be a Fortnightly Book; there is no extant four-play set by Aeschylus, despite the fact that all the plays we have would have belonged to such a tetralogy.) We know the names of the other two tragedies in the trilogy: Prometheus Unbound and Prometheus Fire-bringer. We have fragments of the second, and know that it concerned the unbinding of Prometheus by Heracles. Of the third play in the trilogy we know practically nothing that is not speculative. We can reasonably guess that it would have reconciled Prometheus and Zeus and, possibly, provided an origin story for the torch relay the Athenians ran in honor of Prometheus.

Prometheus Bound is famously a play without much plot -- it would not be far off to say that almost the only thing that happens in it is that Prometheus is bound. Most of the actual story has already happened when the play opens (leading to an occasionally rebellious minority of scholars to suggest every so often that it may have actually been the second in the play, with Prometheus Fire-bringer actually being the first). It is a tragedy of character, then, rather than a tragedy of plot. Prometheus comes off sympathetically, and Zeus badly; the play ends with Prometheus accusing Zeus of injustice, with nothing forthcoming in response. But there is much foreshadowing of what is to come.

Shelley's Prometheus Unbound was intended to be a new sequel to Aeschylus's play, and yet not just a sequel. He wrote it while touring Italy with Mary Shelley -- reflecting on it in Milan, beginning it in Rome, and finishing it in Florence. If Prometheus Bound ends with the injustice of Zeus, Prometheus Unbound ends with the victory of Prometheus.

The Heritage Press volume also contains Mary Shelley's "Notes on Prometheus Unbound". Her explanation for Shelley's choice of subject:

The father of Greek tragedy does not possess the pathos of Sophocles, nor the variety and tenderness of Euripides; the interest on which he founds his dramas is often elevated above human vicissitudes into the mighty passions and throes of gods and demi-gods: such fascinated the abstract imagination of Shelley.

The volume is illustrated by John Farleigh, best known for his wood engravings, with sixteen full-page line-and-wash drawings. Aeschylus is translated by the classicist and novelist Rex Warner, who provides the introduction. It is typeset in Spectrum typeface by Hendrik Clewitts, a former assistant to Jan van Krimpen, who invented the font.

Only the Spirit of God knows the thoughts of God;
but we do not receive the spirit of the world,
but the Spirit from God, who comes to enlighten.
Who can know the mind of the Lord?
But we receive the mind of Christ.
Raise your eyes and look upon the sublime heavens.
Who made them and marshals the muster of their host?
Who calls the stars by name, missing none in their count?
Our Lord made the furthest limits;
He is wise beyond our thinking.

O glorious feast, exalting angels and men,
praised from the mountaintops with psalms and Sunday hymns,
blessed are they who celebrate you with the gospel,
proclaiming it with joyous song,
bright in the sunrise of the week.
Grant, O Lord, that our works may be a gift to You,
that our just action may be a pleasing fragrance,
that our sincere faith may rise as a pure incense,
that we may witness to Your grace,
like a temple shining with light.

May we be made worthy by the gifts you give us
to proclaim Your resurrection with the angels,
to announce Your holy rising with the women,
to take joy in Your victory,
with the apostles rejoicing.
Lift up our eyes to see the holy saints of God.
Who raised them and draws together so great a host?
Who calls those stars by name, giving them their number?
Our Lord made the furthest limits;
He is wise beyond our thinking.

Caveats

For a rough introduction to my philosophy of blogging, including the Code of Amiability I try to follow on this weblog, please read my fifth anniversary post. I consider blogging to be a very informal type of publishing - like putting up thoughts on your door with a note asking for comments. Nothing in this weblog is done rigorously: it's a forum to let my mind be unruly, a place for jottings and first impressions. Because I consider posts here to be 'literary seedings' rather than finished products, nothing here should be taken as if it were anything more than an attempt to rough out some basic thoughts on various issues. Learning to look at any topic philosophically requires, I think, jumping right in, even knowing that you might be making a fool of yourelf; so that's what I do. My primary interest in most topics is the flow and structure of reasoning they involve rather than their actual conclusions, so most of my posts are about that. If, however, you find me making a clear factual error, let me know; blogging is a great way to get rid of misconceptions.